Once upon a time, when PC games used to be 2-dimensional, every kind of graphics processing was done on the CPU. This was also true for early 3D games. Neither Wolfenstein 3D nor Doom with its numerous clones listed a graphics accelerator among their system requirements. Well, they couldn’t since there were no graphics accelerators at that time and game developers did not rely on them. Moreover, talking about gaming applications of their products, Intel and AMD focused on enhancing the capabilities of their CPUs in the way of MMX and 3DNow! instruction sets. Intel promoted MMX as a means to boost the quality, level of detail and speed of gaming graphics whereas the name of AMD’s technology speaks for itself.This situation went on for quite a while. Even rather late projects by id Software and Epic Games such as Quake and Unreal used the CPU as the main tool for processing graphics, notwithstanding the significantly expanded game worlds. Things changed in 1996 when the obscure and young firm 3dfx Interactive unveiled the world’s first 3D graphics accelerator for the PC affordable for ordinary gamers. The product looks ridiculous by today’s standards as it could only map and filter textures, but the quality of the filtering was unprecedented at that time. None of then-existing CPUs, whatever multimedia instruction sets they supported, could deliver such performance even at a lower image quality. A game would look completely different running in the Glide mode as opposed to software mode.